Tales blossoms tell
Photographer Ellen Koteen brings metal to the petal with close-in study of flowers
Byline: LARRY PARNASS
Daily Hampshire Gazette 09/03/2002
THE right lens lets photographer Ellen Koteen peek in on the lives of flowers. And lean in she does -- into the bursting fire of a Gerber daisy, the fleshy folds of a white-red amaryllis and the floppy white petals of an orchid. Koteen says she tried for years to bring the intimate world of flower parts into focus, but only succeeded when she traded a telephoto lens for one better suited to getting close to an object with a camera -- and then even closer. In a stunning debut exhibit at the Forbes Library in Northampton, Koteen demonstrates that while having the right equipment and teachers helps, it is possessing an eye for minute drama -- not just a close-up lens -- that creates great photographs.
Koteen is showing 23 of them in "An Hour With a Flower," which remains on view in the library's remodeled gallery space through Sept. 10. They are the glorious trophies she brought back from expeditions into greenhouses and yards in search of the stories flowers tell. For tell they do. As she demonstrates, a greenhouse yields settings as perfectly staged as any Hollywood set, and as rich in beauty and intrigue. It's natural to find narratives in living things like flowers, for they have fragile beginnings, grand middles and collapsing ends. Some age gracefully; others give in to gravity. The trick Koteen has mastered is to pay her respects to the flowers while remaining alert for features that up the ante.
After years of taking photographs of flowers, Koteen, 55, knows a lot about plants. Expertise could be the death of a project like this, if an artist grew slavishly interested in horticultural anatomy. While many of Koteen's photographs are straightforward portraits, others dig in, capturing the tiny environments out of which living beauty emerges. In "Crocus in Brooklyn," Koteen compels viewers to look past the cylinders of blossoms to the place where tender roots plunge in and life fetches up. She shows how fragile and loose earth seems at this scale and how tentatively blossoms hold on.
Similarly, in "Rose Kiss," she interprets a blossom's folds. It is one of several photographs -- like the one of the amaryllis that welcomes visitors into the exhibit -- that do not show a flower's outer boundaries. Her frames flood with flower parts. "For me, that's experimenting with getting into the body of the flower," she said last week from Maine, where she was vacationing.
Koteen calls the amaryllis image her "Georgia O'Keeffe flower," for it recalls angles and forms of that American painter's work.
Koteen's photographs celebrate floral forms and figures both for what they simply are -- as horticulturists coolly do -- and for what they can be, aesthetically. In just that way, her "Mums Under Glass" pulses with what's possible. This vertical image, measuring 22 by 30 inches, blurs a sea of shimmering yellows and greens nearly past recognition. A few shapes keep it in the realm of flowers. It is a spectacular image that plays ecstatically with distortion. single blossom. But by selecting this one, she teases another effect from what's already so perfect: One petal on the right curls suggestively, as if beckoning a viewer.
"I saw the petals waving at me," Koteen said. In the statement she prepared for the Forbes Library show, Koteen tells visitors she inherited a love of flowers from her mother. "Flowers give me joy and a sense of peace," she writes. "Capturing their beauty in a photograph allows me to hold on to that joy and share it with others. ... Losing myself in the experience of trying to get inside a flower or to preserve the almost perfect scene containing and surrounding one or more flowers is as close to a spiritual experience as I have had."
In "Sweet Peas in California," Koteen parts company with flower-mania by keeping the largest red petals in a soft focus. They are shapely and red, but undercut by Koteen's choice to bring only a single closed bud into focus. "Morning Dew" sings the glory of a dianthus flower, but indirectly. Droplets of water cling to a five-petaled blossom that is a washed-out pink. It seems woozy as well as wet, as if it has come through a long night and swims in memory. "I am looking for something dramatic," Koteen said. "In 'Morning Dew," that one drop coming off was special for me. It's the flower in the context. ... Sometimes I felt it was the shadows that contributed to it. Sometimes, just a bud."
Other times, a flower itself is simply not to be denied. "Red Lily" demands to be everything in its 20-by-26-inch frame -- part sea creature whose green lower limbs reach madly forward, and part regal beauty, reticent and retiring in a crown of red and yellow petals. It's sad to think all the flowers that Koteen found along the way are now long gone by. It sweetens her achievement.